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CHARLESTON, S. C, 

FOR DISTRIBUTION. 

1856. 



REPLY 



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DELIVERED AT THE 



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CHARLESTON, S. C. 

FOR DISTRIBUTION. 

1856. 






WALKER, EVANS k CO., 

STATIONERS AND PRINTERS, 

No. 3 Broad-Street, 

CHARLESTON. 



PREFACE. 



I\ compliance with the wish of a number of gentlemen, the publishers offer to 
the public, in pamphlet form, the reply which lately appeared in the Charleston 
Courier to Dr. Dewey's remarks on Slavery. The pamphlet embraces a few addi- 
tional passages by the author of the reply, on one or two topics in the remarks not 
before noticed. The publishers have also included the remarks themselves, as given 
in the Charleston Mercury of the 18th October, from Northern papers. They are 
extracts from the address delivered by Dr. Dewey at the Elm Tree, in Sheffield, 
Massachusetts, in September last. It is presumed that they are correct, and that 
a reference to them may be convenient to the readers of the reply. 

November 7th, 1850. 



TO THE REY. ORVILLE DEWEY. 



" In the right of your own poor thought," which, you say, 
" cries to heaven in its very weakness," yon have denounced 
Southern society, in your Elm Tree oration. Your friends, in 
this region, thought themselves ahle to say that you would not 
espouse the vulgar topics of the multitude ; that your literary 
taste and gentle philosophy would keep you aloof from the 
coarse stimulant which so much delights the passions of the 
people around you ; that you would not, at least, seek an 
opportunity for indulging their gross appetite for abuse on 
Southern manners and morals. But we are not surprised that 
the confidence has been misplaced. The occasion was too 
alluring — the exciting subject, the sympathetic audience, the 
obvious expectation produced by your sojourn for two winters 
in the very heart of Southern society, in the midst of Southern 
families, with every opportunity afforded by their unsuspi- 
cious hospitality for marking the omissions and commissions 
of Southern life, and registering the misdeeds of the Legrees, 
which you have detected, — all this involved a temptation which 
it would be unreasonable to expect you to resist. Your virtues 
are not ascetic. Why should you refrain from gratifying the 
eager appetite for detraction on the South which pervades your 
people? Why impose on yourselt an unprofitable self-denial 
in reference to those whom you never expect to see again? 
You have already reaped all the fruits that the Southern field 
directly produces, and it was sound philosophy to secure from 
it the indirect advantage which its ofi'ences aiford. Your con- 
demnation of the South gives pleasure to your friends, and 
profit to yourself. It would be foolish to expect that an idle 



6 

motive of delicacy should be allowed t<> debar yon from so 
much enjoyment. 

But although not surprised, we are nevertheless grieved at 
your Elm Tree declamation. It strikes us as, somehow, not in 
strict accordance with true moral taste and sound judgment. 
There is in it something not easily i-econciled with the position, 
so lately held among us, which has enabled you to say, " the 
planters confess this." "the Southern gentlemen admit that"; 
it has done general harm. The advantage which your visit 
gave you for preparing materials in the South for a speech in 
New England could hardly be used as yon have used them, 
without injury to the great cause of hospitality and social life. 
It must produce distrust in the So nth on all fature occasions. 
They received you with unsuspecting cordiality ; your seizing 
the first opportunity to assail theai may serve to close their 
hearts and houses against future lecturers from the same 
quarter. People do not ordinarily invite detraction to their 
homes, however willing to be hospitable. You have added 
another obstacle to those before existing in the way of social 
intercourse between the two sections of the country. The 
reflection must be painful to every man. The worst would 
avoid it. It reminds us of the Eastern story of the Emir and 
his horse. The Emir Hamid was wealthy and charitable. 
Among his riches was a horse, which he valued above them 
all. The steed was the fleetest and most enduring in Arabia. 
A neighboring chief envied the Emir, and wished to lay hands 
on his property. In vain the chief used every art of persua- 
sion and ofler of value. Hami/l was deaf to every thing. 
One day as he was riding his favorite horse in the desert, he 
saw a man lying on the ground, writhing and groaning and 
uttering cries and supplications for aid. The Emir dismounted 
and hastened to help the afllicted stranger. At that moment 
the chief, for it was he, sprang from the ground, leapt into the 
saddle, and galloped off on his prize. The Emh\ waking from 
his surprise, called out to the flying robber to pause for an 
instant. " My friend," said the Emir, "you have gained your 
end, but, I pray you, never tell any one in what way you 
have succeeded. It may prevent travellers from doing deeds of 



charity by the way side." The story adds,lthat the plunderer 
repented, restored the horse, and the parties became good 
friends ever after. You would rob us of property and good 
name ; whether the attendant circumstances are not similar, 
and whether the last act of tlie repentant robber be not worthy 
of imitation, it is for you to decide. 

We can see nothing new or strong in your attack on slavery. 
•Your reasonings, however applauded by your hearers, are 
feeble and flimsy to us. Notwithstanding your emphatic decla- 
ration to the Southern people, " you are in the wrong ; you 
are certainly in the wrong; your judgment is wrong; your 
course is wrong"; the argument of your speech does not weigh 
with them a straw, and your solemn assurance is without 
authority. 

" If a man," you tell us, " should throw his lasso, in the 
hunting grounds of Africa, over the neck of a wild horse and 
subject him to domestic use, it would be right. But if he 
should throw his lasso over the neck of a man roving; wild 
and free in the wilderness, should tear him from his wife and 
children, put chains on his limbs, and sell him into hopeless 
bondage, we should, pronounce that a monstrous wrong." 
" And no talk," yon add, " about civilizing or christianizing 
or improving the African race, could ever stand against that 
conviction." It is characteristic of the mode of reasoning 
which the Abolitionists use, on the subject of slavery, that 
something is always introduced into the statement which does 
not necessarily belong to it, and so uses and abuses, substance 
and accident are mixed up in endless confusion. Divest your 
statement of the mere rhetoric, the pomp and circumstance, 
the lasso, the hunting ground, the tearing from wife and chil- 
dren, which would vitiate your argument if thrown into logical 
form, and it amounts to this — you mean to say that the seizure 
of a tribe of wild Africans, and transporting them to a country 
where they will be civilized, christianized and improved, would 
be a monstrous wrong. This is your proposition, fairly stated, 
and relieved from the ornaments which a professed rhetorician 
so naturally finds in his way. This is your position, and, if I 
were accustomed to deal in ex-cathedra phrases, I would say, 



as you say to us, " you are in the wroni^ ; you are certainly in 
the wrong ; your judgment is wrong ; your course is wrong." 
You undervalue the blessings of civilization, the far greater 
blessings of Christianity, if you think them dearly bought by 
the restraints imposed, in a Christian land, on heathen savages. 
You prefer to those blessings the wild freedom of the barbarian, 
helpless and hopeless, for ages past and ages to come. Are 
you not confounding the means with the end ? The wild raan*s 
brute freedom is not the end of existence. Freedom is a means 
only for reaching the great purposes of huma)i life. These are 
trutli, virtue, sound morals, pure religion, human happiness 
here and hereafter. The terms of your proposition admit that 
the wild man reaches them, :ind can reach them, not by his 
freedom, but by slavery only. You decide that they are not 
worth the price thus paid — better a wild free savage, than a 
Christian slave ! You belong to those who " bawl for freedom 
in their senseless mood," and do not know that they who would 
be free " must first be wise and good." The freedom that you 
would preserve has neither wisdom nor goodness. It is license, 
not liberty. It is the freedom of the wild horse. It is attended 
with brutal ignorance, superstitions, gross, stupid, devilish, with 
the cruelty of the canibal, the carnage of endless strife, the 
horrors, so hideous, of heathen African life. The African who 
is brought from it to slavery, blesses God for the change. But 
you think all these things are better, with wild freedom, than 
civilization and Christianity, witii the restraints of slavery in 
a Christian land. Surely, sir, this is strange doctrine for a 
Christian teacher. It is not the doctrine of the Apostles and 
Prophets. Paul and Moses would repudiate it, and brand it 
as heresy, as hostile to the teachino- which accounts all thinsrs 
to be but dross, in comparison with the excellency of a life in 
Christ. In civilized society we fetter this wild freedom which 
you so much admire, by the involuntary servitude of the peni- 
tentiary, for long years, and for life. We subdue it by the 
prison, the hangman and the gallows. We limit it, at every 
turn, in every department of society. Why will you permit 
these abuses of wild freedom to exist ? You take life to ensure 
order in the State for others, and you think it a monstrous 



wrung to restrain the wild freedom of the African savage, in 
order to impart religious truth to the savage himself. The 
conquered barbarian gives his freedom for his life. Is the life 
of the civilized white of less value than the freedom of the 
savage black? If the lasso is bad, surely the gallows, garote 
and gillotine are worse. If no talk, as your phrase goes, of 
Christianity or civilization or moral improvement can justify 
the taking of savage freedom, can any talk excuse the taking 
of the civilized man's life? 

But suppose your argument sound, and that no talk of giving 
to the African the freedom with which Christ alone can make 
him free, will justify us in going into his hunting grounds and 
depriving him, with lassos, of his wild liberty. This will not 
affect the merits of the true question. Your statement of the 
case is not candid. Our fathers, to whose opinion you love to 
appeal, did not go, as your fancy implies, with lassos, into the 
African hunting grounds, to make slaves. They found them 
ready made to their hands. The negroes were slaves already. 
In all time they have been slaves. Captives in war, conquered 
slave soldiers, prisoners whose skulls would have formed pyra- 
mids or paved the court square of the King of Ashantee or 
Dahomy — they were saved from slaughter to continue slaves. 
It is better, you think, that they should die heathens, that their 
heads should become paving stones for a Pagan potentate, than 
that they should be civilized, christianized and improved by 
slavery in a land of Christian liberty. This is your position. 

But admit it to be a monstrous wrong to interfere in these 
enjoyments of African freedom, and to bring the African from 
the blessings of his native land, under any circumstances, still 
your argument is wide of the true question at issue. If that 
question were, shall the slave trade with Africa be re-opened . 
if your ships were about to go again to the coast of Guinea to 
bring emigrants after their former fashion, to the Southern 
States, to be made useful Christian laborers, blessing, with their 
industrv, all the peoples of the world, in a greater degree than 
the African tribes, taken together, have been able to do since 
the beginning of their race — if, in obtaining slaves, the crews 
employed were about to seize upon free men of Africa and 



10 

drag them into slavery — then yonr argument, whatever it may 
be worth otherwise, would at least have the merit of being to 
the point. But it is not to the point in the great practical 
question now at issue. It is like that of Dr. Wayland, entirely 
outside of the matter in dispute. Dr. Wayland says, "I have 
wished to make it clear that slavery, or the holding of men in 
bondage, is always and everywhere a moral wrong, a trans 
gression of the law of the Creator. To put this subject in a 
proper light, suppose that your family and mine were neigh- 
bors ; suppose that T should set fire to your house, shoot you 
as you came out, and seizing on your wife and children, compel 
them to work for my benefit, without their consent, &c., &c., 
would I not, in doing so, violate the supreme law of the Cre- 
ator; would this be to do as we would be done by?" You 
oppose the same slavery by a similar argument. I will answer 
the one supposition by another. Suppose, my dear sir, that 
one of your landless ISTorthern socialists should deliver lectures 
on the subject of property to those who own farms, maintaining 
that all appropriation by individuals of houses and lands was 
a monstrous wrong; that property was theft, and therefore 
clearly a violation of the moral law. To place the subject in 
a simple light, suppose that he should say to the audience, your 
families and mine are neighbors ; you seize me with a lasso, or 
you drag me and my children away from our natural rights ; 
you take what ought to be, in part, my farm, and appropriate 
to your exclusive use the fruits and fields which are the common 
gift of nature to all ; in doing this, are you not violating the 
supreme law of the Creator? Would this be doing as you 
would be done by ? Your proposition is, that all property in 
man is sin, the Socialists, that all property in land is a sin. If 
he begs the question as to one kind of property, so do you of 
the other. You think your principle clear, so also does he. 
You maintain your position by irrelevant suppositions, he does 
the same. His doctrine is as tenable as plausible, and will 
be, by and by, more acceptable to your masses, than your own 
is now. 

You both rest on the same fallacy, that, it is wrong to possess 
a certain property at all, if it is wrong to acquire it by violent 



11 

means. We do not advocate arson or murder, or the capture 
of free men with lassos, as you and Dr. Way land suppose ; we 
only vindicate our right to the property actually in our pos- 
session. 

Your mind distorts and discolours every thing connected with 
slavery. With the declaration that the slave trade is piracy, 
you connect the assertion that " those who deal in slaves at 
the South now are held infamous and excluded from all good 
society, and you never talked with a Southern man who did 
not say, "this selling of slaves is a fearful part of oor system." 

To call the slave trade piracy is a mere abuse of words. We 
should perpetrate a similar one to call the slander on the South 
murder or manslaughter. 

Your assertion is an insult to the brokers of the Southern 
States. It is as groundless as it is reckless. The dealing in 
slaves, like other branches of business, is dependent for its 
character on the parties engaged in it, and the mode in which 
it is conducted. Bank presidents and directors who sell and 
buy notes and acceptances share, we presume, the first ranks 
of society ; but there are forgers and swindlers dealing in the 
same wares, in Wall-street, and elsewhere, who would tho- 
roughly disgrace it. You say, without condition or reservation, 
that in the South dealers in slaves are infamous, and excluded 
from all good society. Why, sir, we venture to say, they were 
admitted to your own. You accepted their courtesies, shared 
their hospitality, enjoyed their company, and found them as 
refined in manners and morals, as elevated in character and 
pure in conduct, as the most perfect examples of society in 
Boston or New York, — we will not say as Dr. Dewey himself, 
for this would be thought an equivocal compliment by the 
parties in question. 

The appeal you make to the conversation of Southern gentle- 
men, in confirmation of your assertions, is neither creditable 
nor admissible. We know how easily the loose language of 
conversation is misapprehended, warped and changed by the 
bias of the hearer, especially when that bias is a strong one. 
If the selling of slaves is a fearful thing in slavery, there are 
sights far more fearful in your system of free labour. It is a 



12 

fearful thing to see women, with^_scanty wages, prostituting 
themselves for support. It is a fearful thing to see the hungry 
hireling asking for work, and unable to get it ; knowing that 
his children starve at home for bread, and unable to find em- 
ployment by which he must obtain it. It is a fearful thing to 
see the squalid mass of beggary, in what are called free States, 
importunate for alms and consigned to hopeless filth, vice and 
degradation. It is fearful to visit certain parts of Boston, 'New 
York and Philadelphia. It is fearful to see the multitudes of 
European free labourers who abandon their homes, friends, 
relatives, parents ; decimated hj disease on the voyage ; crowd- 
ing your hospitals, and exhausting the resources of your public 
and private charities. The selling of the slave is what preserves 
him from the miseries of the unemployed hireling. It is the 
mode by which he is transferred from the master who cannot 
support him to the master who can. There is no interval in 
which he is unemployed, and none in which lie is not secure 
of food, shelter and clothing. He is never, therefore, in danger 
of starving to death. When your hirelings are safe from the 
risk, and equally confident of commanding subsistence, it will 
be when the laws of free States enable the labourer to demand 
a new employer before he is dismissed by the old. The selling 
of the slave is a transfer of the obligation to labour, and this 
transfer carries with it a right to be supported for himself and 
his children. It is liis labour only that is sold and bought, and 
not his body and soul, as your writers profess to consider it. 
His body is as much his own as the hired operative's, and his 
soul as free to engage in its proper occupation. When your 
fancy shall be again on the wing in pursuit of the fearful things 
in slave selling, let it liui^^er for a season on the sufiPerino-s of 
feeble and diseased labourers, tiirust out of sight in lanes and 
cellars, incapable of employment or unable to procure it. 

Your main reason for being dissatisfied with the Southern 
people is, ihat they have changed their views of slavery. It 
is a change, yon say, that "alters all your moral and political 
relations with slavery, except one— the old compact of non- 
interference." How the compact of non-interference makes 
an exception, it is not easy to understand. For nearly forty 



13 

years the North has waged war on the manners, customs and 
institutions of the South, by every mode in their power — b.y 
speaking, writing, robbing them of their property, resisting 
their efforts to reclaim it, depriving them of their equal rights 
to the common territory of the Union, and exciting and fos- 
tering a spirit of hostility against them. You cannot name 
one mode of interference which your Northern people have 
not habitually practised. They have held all other States, in 
peace, friends, save only the States of the South. 

You console and contradict yourself, however, in professing 
to believe that the change is not universal. Many hold the 
old opinion, as you think. " We are always mistaking," you 
say, " partisan zeal for public sentiment, the agitated surface 
for the conservative depths of society." The inference from this 
remark is, that the mass in the South is unchanged. Accord- 
ingly, you tell us, that "in a company of twenty gentlemen, 
where the subject of slavery was freely discussed, seventeen 
out of the twenty retained the opinion you are pleased to 
approve — the opinion that slavery is an evil ; that it must and 
would die out and disappear from the country ; that it should 
be confined to the rice and cotton fields ; that it is here, they 
could not help it, and must get along with it as they could." 
Pardon me, sir, for saying this cannot be true. You have 
mistaken, you have misapprehended their views. If unity of 
sentiment ever existed, in any country, on any subject, it is in 
the South, on the subject of slavery. It pervades all parties. 
It is as nearly universal as public opinion can ever be. 

But, suppose your statement to be correct, and the quoted 
sentence about partisan zeal and public sentiment to be pro- 
perly applied, what becomes of the change you complain of — 
the reason by which you justify the alteration of all your 
moral and political relations with slavery ? If three only out 
of twenty have changed, with what propriety can you say that 
" a change has come over the spirit of the South ? " Is a small 
minority the South ? Because three out of twenty change, 
do you alter all your relations with the seventeen ? Are you 
not mistaken in supposing that you have altered these relations 
from any cause arising in the South? The cause is among 



14 

yourselves. It is Northern sentiment that is altered. Formerly 
Southern families could travel in New England, with their 
servants, without the fear of being robbed ; now they are plun- 
dered in the first village where they stop to rest. Formerly, 
the South was the subject of eulogy and fraternity ; now every 
epithet of denunciation and abuse is lavished upon her. Your 
change is immeasurable from the slave-ship to the anti-slavery 
pulpit, and anti-slavery legislation. It involves a settled hos- 
tility to the Southern States. The Missouri controversy, the 
Kansas dispute, are the occasions only, not the cause of the 
war. There are many exceptions, we know ; very many, we 
hope. But you are not of the number. It would be unrea- 
sonable to expect it. The moral courage of Lord and Adams 
is not an every day virtue. It is as rare as it is admirable. 

You justify, then, your alteration of moral and political rela- 
tions with slavery because the South has changed its opinions, 
and 3'ou assure us, at the same time, that the South is not 
changed ; that seventeen out of twenty retain their sentiments ; 
that the great conservative depths of society are undisturbed. 
You approve of the old idea, that, in the South, negro slavery 
should be " tolerated," not " espoused," because it would be 
confined to the rice fields where " it may be modified, where 
it may die out ; " and you condemn the new opinion, as you 
think it, that slavery is right, because it would extend, because 
the three millions will become thirty. Under the system or 
sentiment that you are pleased to tolerate, the negro race would 
die out ; under that which you consider intolerable, it would 
increase to thirty millions. You prefer the first, we the last 
condition of the race, as the most humane, to say the least of 
it, What, in Heaven's name, you ask, are ive to do with it ? 
All we ask you to do with it, in the case supposed, is not to 
interfere. For ourselves we have no apprehensions. Thirty 
millions of blacks will not be one too many for fifty millions 
of whites. They will grow, you say, in intelligence. We have 
no doubt of it. We know that every new generation is more 
intelligent than the old. We think it to be desired, not depre- 
cated. There is an immense distance between the negroes of 
the present generation and their barbarian fathers. The pro- 



15 

portion between the three millions now existing and the three 
hundred thousand said to have been imported, is the same as 
between the three millions and the thirty which you seem to 
anticipate. And yet, there is no part of the world more secure 
than the South, from disorder and violence. You apprehend 
from their intelligence servile wars. In the great slaveholding 
States of antiquity, in Greece and Rome, the rulers of the 
world and parents of art and science, poets and philosophers" 
were in the number of their slaves ; but no servile wars sprang 
from poets and philosophers. The few that arose were from 
escaped bands of ignorant and brutal gladiators, led on, per- 
haps, and excited by turbulent and factious freemen, seeking 
to trample on the rights of their countrymen. Very few these 
wars were in number compared with the riots and disorders of 
hireling States. We apprehend none, except it be from your 
interference. 

We must differ with you, then, as to the future of the black 
race in America. We desire that it should increase and mul- 
tiply, living in the continued enjoyment of peaceful homes, 
giving to the world new comforts and riches, and, to their 
native land, the promise of brighter and better days. Xor 
can we understand how a teacher of Ethics, as you are, can 
hold the opinions you profess. So long as the South only 
tolerated slavery, you were able to approve ; but when they 
changed from a mere toleration of it as a wrong, to the "espou- 
sal " of it as a right, they lost, you say, the sympathy of all 
men. While they confess that slavery is a sin you are willing 
to bear with them, but when they defend it as none, you 
adjudge them to be insupportable. Now, sir, we do not see 
how a Christian teacher can tolerate or excuse one who lives 
in the habitual commission of a sin and makes no effort to 
forsake it. If slavery is a sin, it ought not to exist in a Chris- 
tian land. It should be abandoned forthwith. If we admit it 
to be a sin, and continue to practise it, we deserve no sympathy, 
apology or forbearance from Dr. Dewey. We should have, as 
we think, far juster claims on him, if, believing that the slavery 
of the negro race is right, consistent with revelation, conducive 
to the good of both white and black, we continue, under that 



16 

conviction, to hold them as slaves. And this is most certainly 
the conviction of the Southern people— a conviction groving 
stronger as the question is more discussed. We ask no favors, 
no toleration, no sympathy. We want nothing but truth and 
justice, and if our cause cannot stand consistently with these, 
let it fall. But, rely upon it, no rhetoric, no solemnity of 
adjuration, no mock pathetic sentiment, will weigh with us a 
rush in the discussion. When you declaim at the Elm Tree, 
we see in the rhetoric nothing but the common places of the 
Abolition pulpit; when you exclaim, "God forbid that the 
number of slaves or slave States should be increased," we are 
content to abide His will — if He forbid, they will not increase ; 
if they increase, it will be evident that He does not forbid. 
When you tell us that Southern parents send their sons to 
Northern colleges, because they think their own home " not a 
good home for civilization, Christianity, morality," and that 
they say of their home, when choosing a place of education 
for a son, " not here, he must not stay here," you pronounce a 
libel on the parents of the South which nothing can excuse or 
palliate. Why, sir, do you not know that, where one youth 
from the South is educated in a Northern college, five hundred 
are educated at home ; that every year adds to the number of 
colleges in the Southern States ; that in each succeeding year 
there is a smaller number of young men sent for education to 
the North, from every Southern State. There are a few, we 
are sorry to say it, who still send their sons to Yale or Cam- 
bridge, either from some idle notion that they are better 
instructed, not in morals but in learning, or because of old 
attachments to the Alma Mater where they have themselves 
been graduated. But you cannot lay your finger on one man 
who places his preference of a Northern college on the basis 
you assign — there is not one man among us so base as to 
traduce the civilization, Christianity or morality of his own 
country. The few who send their sons to Northern colleges 
are among the very men who are most decided in the assertion 
of Southern rights, either of property or reputation. We 
believe that our churches are as pure, our preachers as devout, 
our people as moral and refined as your own. It gives us 



17 

no pleasure to say so, but for one act of violence with us, we 
will show three with you. The crimes of the United States 
which are marked with peculiar atrocity — the gigantic frauds, 
the infernal machines, the blowing up of houses, the burning 
and robbery of churches, the obstruction of railroads and their 
reckless management, the murders singularly horrible, where 
limbs of the victims are burnt, boxed up, thrown into vaults 
to be fished up at a convenient season ; each act a repetition 
of the murder — these things belong to your latitude, not to 
ours. 

These charges are of record ; yours on the people of the South 
are guess, supposition, conjecture. " I do not know," you tell 
your friends, " the body of the Southern people ; I am not 
acquainted with plantation life ; the great evils are doubtless 
there, not in the cities ; and I believe that they are great evils. 
I believe that all candid and thoughtful men among the planters 
admit it. There may be less cruelty than is often alleged, but 
there is great cruelty ; there may not be many Legrees, but 
there are Legrees." Your time was spent in the cities where, 
as you intimate, the evil is not; you know nothing of the 
plantations where, you say, the evil, cruelty and Legrees are. 
All candid and thoughtful men among the planters, you afiirm, 
admit these things, but you did not know, you confess, one in 
in a thousand of these candid and thoughtful men. You adduce 
no evidence, you saw nothing, you observed nothing, you think 
it enough to tell us you believe. You sustain this belief not 
by facts to prove that the planters are cruel, but by a conjec- 
ture or argument to prove that they must be so. " When 
irresponsible power and violent passions hold the reign over a 
subject race, we know," you say, " that there must be cruelty ; 
there must be a certain inhumanity." It is so ; it must be so- — 
that is the sum of what you say. The assertion is without a 
fact to support it ; the conjecture or argument we will proceed 
to examine. 

Irresponsible power is power subject to no restraint. Is the 

slaveholder subject to none ? What are the checks in ISTew 

England on those who exercise authority over others in the 

various relations of life, as husbands, fathers, teachers, com- 

2 



18 

raanders of ships? They are public opinion, religions and 
moral sentiment, the laws of the land. The same checks prevail 
here. We are not aware that there is less respect for law and 
order in the South than the North. The religious or moral 
sentiment is quite as strong ; the laws are as certainly executed. 
They do not always succeed in restraining the evil passions of 
Southern men, but are they more successful with your own ? 
If a master here sometimes murders a slave, does it never 
happen in the North that a husband murders his wife? Why 
is the power existing in the one case called an irresponsible 
power, and not in the other ? In the murder of the wife, you 
infer that the criminal has violated all restraints, human and 
divine ; in the murder of the slave, you conclude that there 
are no restraints to violate. In the murder of the wife, you 
ascribe the crime, not to the institution of matrimony, but to 
the villainy of the criminal ; in the murder of the slave, you 
impute it, not to the perj)etrator, but to slavery. Why this 
difference in your conclusions ? — because, you say, the slave is 
of a subject race, the property of the master, and therefore he 
is more exposed to violence. But this reason operates surely 
and strongly in the opposite way. We will lay aside all con- 
sideration of the higher and gentler relations that naturally 
spring up between masters and slaves ; we will forget, for the 
occasion, that they are men with human hearts in their bosoms 
subject to all affectionate impulses, producing, on the one 
hand, the most unreserved confidence, and on the other the 
noblest devotion ; we will place them on what the politicians 
call the lowest platform — the master is the owner only, the 
slave is the property only, or, as your friends love to call him, 
a mere chattel. It is sad nonsense to call him so ; but if he is 
a chattel, he is a very valuable one. Does this fact exercise 
no restraining influence on the owner's power ? So far from 
exciting does it not curb the disposition to injure or abuse ? 
The farmer's best horse bears no comparison in value to the 
negro slave ; does the farmer destroy his horse from the mere 
wantonness of passion ; does he maim his ox or his ass ? Do 
the ladies of your State, in a fit of petulance, batter and destroy 
their valuable plate or jewels — or shall we conclude that the 
2* 



19 

love of property loses its power in those cases only where the 
property is most valuable ? We learn from friglitful revela- 
tions in the English criminal courts how this principle of selfish 
interest has been strong enough to annihilate the ties of kindred 
and affection, and to sacrifice for gain the ensured lives of 
relative and friend. If it has this fearful power to destroy, 
has it no power to preserve ? But we disclaim this low view 
of the relation between the master and his people. It belongs 
to you, not to us. The relation is fruitful in kind and warm 
attachments protecting and defending the slave ; and to con- 
clude difierently, because there are exceptions, would be as 
wise as to infer that there is no love in families, because there 
are sometimes discord, hatred and death. 

We are sorry to see you adopt the coarse cant of the abolition 
school, in charging the Southern planter with breeding negroes 
for sale. Slaves outgrow their homes, and go from Virginia, 
or are carried, if you please, to a larger field and better soil, 
as your laborers leave their homes in Massachusetts, or are sent 
by your aid societies to the fertile lands of the West. In either 
case it may be said that the old State breeds laborers for the 
new. The phrase is as applicable in the one as in the other. 
In both cases it is coarse and in bad taste. It suits the slang 
of party only. Strictly taken, it is untrue. Neither hireling 
nor slave State breeds labor for export. You assert it for the 
South, we deny it, and ask for evidence and proof, not decla- 
mation and the stratagems of rhetoric. 

You seem to be anxious for our lives and fortunes, and gloomy 
apprehensions fill your mind as to the future condition of the 
Southern States. You paint coming events in sombre colors. 
Nothing can help us. Whether in the Union or out of the 
Union, we are never to escape the world's abuse and slander. 
"If you could throw off Northern interference and the Northern 
connection," you tell us, " and form a republic for yourselves, 
your republic would lie under the social Ostracism of the w^iole 
world." And you adjure us, " for God's sake, to consider what 
we are doing, and where we are going." Certainly, my dear 
sir, the world's opinion is worth something, but it is not the 
voice of God. It is very uncertain, very subject to change. 



20 

and is not and never will be the sole or best standard of truth 
and right. We appeal from it to the law of God. We appeal 
from it, from what it now is, to what it has been, until lately, 
always and everywhere, semjper et ubique, among patriarchs 
and the nations nearest to patriarchal times, among Jews and 
Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, Heathens, Mahometans and 
Christians. Serfage is hardly yet at an end in Germany. It 
prevails in Russia. The fashion, fifty years ago, was to bring 
the blacks f.iom Africa ; it is now, to carry them there. Can 
you pretend to say what it may be fifty years hence ? Are 
you willing to make this unstable public opinion the rule of 
right and test of truth ? What, then, will become of the 
particular church of which you are the boast and ornament? 
What says public opinion in reference to the tenets and doc- 
trines of the Unitarian Church? Since the days of Arius they 
have been condemned, utterly, by Catholic, Greek, Armenian, 
Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist. 
Your church is outside the pale of sound opinion with all 
Christendom. It is " Ostracised" by the whole Christian world, 
by the most pious saints, by the profoundest sages, by the great 
body of critics, philologists, teachers, preachers and theologians. 
They refuse to you the appellation of Christian. In the judg- 
ment of all Trinitarian churches, your church is no Christian 
church. Pray understand me: I do not intend to say one 
word on the merits of the controversy. But I ask you whether 
this public opinion of the Christian world has the right or 
power to decide it ? Shall I adjure you, " for God's sake, to 
consider what you are doing, and where you are going ? " You 
are a small people, not so large, not so compact, not so strong 
as we are. You are not supported, as we are, by the practices 
and opinions of nations, always and everywhere, until very 
lately. Will you submit ? Will you leave your pulpit and 
abandon your creed 1 Certainly not ! You appeal to the Scrip- 
ture — so do we. You will maintain truth and right, as you 
conceive it, against the whole world — so shall we. Even your 
speech and authority do not make us " bate one jot of heart 
or hope." If, sir, at any future period, you should re-visit the 
uncivilized, unchristian and demoralized society of the South, 



21 

you will find that even your Elm Tree oration, whatever admi- 
ration it may have produced in Massachusetts, has aroused 
among us no other sentiment than aversion and disgust. 

You close your remarks on the subject of Slavery by a 
number of sentences, which amount to repeated asseverations 
only, that you do not love or admire it. " We do not like it, 
sirs, that is wliat we say to all its advocates." It is quite true. 
That is very much all you do say, in various shapes and forms 
of words, from Curran's African or Indian sun, to the negro 
songs of Christy's white minstrels with blackened faces, which 
you seem to think are composed by Virginia slaves, and which 
you consider " the strongest anti-slavery speeches you know." 
They are, without doubt, as good as the best ; but the judgment 
you express of their significance of value, is the most ridiculous 
notion of modern times. 

In taking the stand you have, you are not influenced, you 
tell us, by the excitement of the day. But, you add, there 
are ample causes for excitement — the Kansas border war, "the 
deed done in the Senate chamber, so atrocious that I have no 
name for it." JSTever did man more thoroughly mistake his 
own feelings, motives and character, if, indeed, we are to con- 
sider you as being in earnest. You blow hot and cold with the 
same breath. You profess to stand aloof from the tumult, and 
trumpet on the seditious, to the fray, at the same time. An 
unscrupulous declaimer in the Senate chooses to indulge in 
slander and abuse for the poor reputation of imitating an 
ancient orator, and he is caned by one of the parties aggrieved. 
A distinguished gentleman from your own State, while he 
condemns the chastisement, declares that, if he had made the 
speech, he would have thought it prudent to carry an iron pot 
on his head. The punishment naturally followed the off'ence. 
It afi'ected neither life nor limb. It mortified the self-conceit, 
and curbed the arrogance only of an intellectual gladiator. 
And you speak of it, without a word of censure on the libel 
that caused it, as an act so atrocious that you are unable to 
find a name for it. If it had been a murder like the blackest 
that darkens your annals, you could not describe it in more 
exaggerated terms. And then you tell us you are not infiu- 



22 

enced by the excitement of the time. Excuse us, sir, we can 
neither put faith in the assurance, nor respect the man who 
makes it. If you share the excitement around you, your 
declaration is insincere ; if you do not, you are the more inex- 
cusable for adding fuel to the flame that threatens to destroy 
the countr}^ 

You profess to believe that "if slavery covered the whole 
world, it would, in a century, require another planet to sustain 
it." In the time of the Apostles it did cover the whole world ; 
it covered the world for ages before, for ages after ; and yet we 
are not aware that history speaks of any assistance having 
been required or sent from our neighbor, the moon, excepting 
the moonshine, which she now bestows equally on hireling and 
on slave States. We do not depend on you, either morally, 
religiously, or physically. Our people go among you to spend 
money ; yours come among us to make it. The South can 
not only sustain itself, but it finds a surplus to expend on itine- 
rant venders from the North of wares, material or intellectual, 
clocks or lectures, tin ware or sermons. Yours were not a 
gift to the South, nor were they considered as absolutely 
essential to its well being. We have not the huge fortunes of 
your great merchants, neither have we your sinks of filth, 
wretchedness and pauperism. We have no millionaires, but 
we have no street beggars. We have no palaces of brown 
stone, but we have no poor to farm out to the lowest bidder, 
as you have in New England. 

The South produces and exports cotton, grain, cattle ; your 
State is unable to grow its own bread. I will not trouble you 
with statistical statements of the productions of the Southern 
States, productions that, in hundreds of millions, sustain the 
foreign commerce of the whole country. You do not descend 
to these ordinary practical views. But we ask attention to 
one test of the soundness of your opinion, which cannot be 
mistaken. There are before your eyes two worlds on a small 
scale ; one, of free negroes, the other, of slave laborers ; one, 
made a wreck by freedom, and fast relapsing into all the want, 
superstition and blood-thirstiness of an African State; the other, 
a scene of unexampled wealth, prosperity and improvement, 



23 

notwithstanding the continued introduction, by Yankee ingc- 
nuitj, of new African barbarians. To restore slavery to Ilayti, 
would be to restore peace and abundance. To abolisli it in 
Cuba, would be to destroy it. How does your philosophy 
explain the facts in these two West India planets ? Wliicli is 
the most able to sustain the other ? Life deals, not in abstrac- 
tions, but in practical experiences. These are the guides of 
statesmen and States. 

Your remarks, then, on slavery, are a series of fallacies 
only. 

1st. You prefer the brute liberty of the wild savage to the 
servitude which alone can give him civilization and Christi- 
anity; the savage himself decides differently, and more wisely; 
you sacrifice the life of the civilized man to preserve civiliza- 
tion, and you think the African's savage freedom too precious 
to exchange for it. 

2d. You misstate the question — it is not whether we shall 
make freemen slaves by violence, but whether we shall hold 
those as slaves who have never been free ; it is not whether we 
shall seize on a farm by arson and murder, but whether we 
shall keep one inherited from our fathers. 

3d, You lived in the Southern cities, and admit that no 
cruelty is found there ; you know nothing of the plantations, 
and assert that they are scenes of evils, cruelties and Legrees. 
You confess that you did not know one in a thousand of the 
planters in the South ; and you affirm that all candid and 
thoughtful men among them agree with you in opinion. 

4th. You change your moral and political relations with the 
South, because it has changed its opinions; and you tell us at 
the same time, that the South is not changed. You prefer the 
opinion under which slavery would die out and the slaves dis- 
appear, and look with horror to their increase in number and 
intelligence as disastrous to the country, and you forget that 
this is inhumane ; that the slaves have already increased in 
the proportion you apprehend, not to the danger, but the profit 
of the country ; and that a Christian African is more easily 
governed than an African savage. 

5th. You think it more consistent with sound morality to 



24 

believe slavery a sin, and to tolerate it, than to believe it no sin, 
and to maintain and defend it. 

6th. You assert that Southern parents send their sons to the 
North to avoid the demoralization of their homes-; and you 
know that where one youth goes to a college at the North, five 
hundred are sent to those at home. 

Yth. You threaten us with the coming social Ostracism of 
the civilized world, if we retain our principles ; and you disre- 
gard the religious Ostracism of the Christian world condemning 
your own. 

8th. You profess to believe that a slave State cannot exist 
without being sustained ; and you know that the great nations 
of the world, the richest, strongest, most learned, most refined, 
have been all slave States. 

"We have resorted to recriminations with pain. We make 
them in self-defence only. Then, surely, if ever, " to recrimi- 
nate is just." When we are unjustly, falsely, and scandalously 
assailed, we owe it to ourselves and to the world's opinion, 
which you so much revere, to protest against the wrong, and 
to show the unworthiness of those who make the attack. We 
lament the necessity. Nothing would induce us to stoop to 
the vein of remark which such a protest and reply involves 
but the arrogance that presumes to place the South, for any 
conceivable cause, material or moral, in a position of depend- 
ence on those whose impulses of vanity or calculations of 
interest can abuse the confidence of social life, and turn its 
sweets to gall and wormwood. We would gladly return to 
the mutual respect and confidence that prevailed with the 
North and South at the close of the Revolution, and for thirty 
years afterwards. We have no sympathy with those who 
desire the destruction of the Federal Union. We would joy- 
fully preserve it, and see its great and growing resources 
devoted, as they are, to the arts of peace, rather than wasted 
on the necessities of war. And this we say with the perfect 
conviction that if the South should form a separate republic, 
it would grow in strength and wealth, compact and complete, 
teres atque rotundus, able to defy all enemies, and to confer 
benefits on every ally and friend. But to preserve peace and 



25 

the Union, your eternal attacks on us must cease. There can 
be no peace if you are forever presenting to us a sword. 

We have no ill will towards you, sir. Your conduct produces 
no feeling so strong among us as resentment. It would have 
been wiser and purer for you, we think, to keep ah)of, within 
the serene air of your hopeful and genial philosophy. But if 
you prefer the slough of party turmoil to the shady grove and 
smooth shaven green, we can only leave you in your mire, 
pity your moral taste, and hope to see you and hear you no 
more. 

SOME OF YOUR FORMER FRIENDS. 



•4. 

r 



EXTRACTS 



REV. ORVILLE DEWEFS ORATION. 



If a man should go into the hunting grounds of Africa, and 
should throw his lasso over the neck of a horse, and bring it 
home and subdue it, and subject it to domestic use, we should 
say it was right ; for we believe that God made that animal 
for our service. But if he should throw his lasso over the neck 
of a man, roving wild and free in the wilderness — should tear 
him from his family and his home ; should put chains on his 
limbs and bring him over the sea, and sell him, and his children 
after him, into hopeless bondage, wo should pronounce that a 
monstrous wrong. And no talk about civilizing, or christian- 
izing, or improving the African race, could ever stand against 
that conviction. It is a conviction, I say, intrenched in the 
very breast of humanity ; all the world has agreed to call the 
slave trade piracy ; the man with the lasso is a pirate ; there 
is no darker name for crime than slave-trader ; the very men 
who deal in slaves at the South noiv are held infamous, and 
excluded from all good society ; and I never talked with a 
Southern man who did not say, " this selling of slaves is a fearful 
part of our system." Well may they say it; and now I say, 
all this being admitted, can any man in his heart pronounce 
and feel that this system is a good thing, an excellent thing, 
an admirable system ! 

Our fathers did not think so. The colonies protested against 
it. The men of the Revolution looked upon it as an evil, not 
as a good ; and they agreed, North and South together, by an 



28 

ordinance, to exclude it from the Korth-western territory. They 
never thought — nobody ever thought — that it was possible it 
might spread far West and South, till it enveloped half the 
continent. It had retired from the North ; it would retreat 
from the Middle States ; it would be confined to the rice and 
cotton fields; it might be modified there, or it might die out; 
at any rate it was there — they could not help it — they must 
submit to it, and get along with it as they could. 

But now a great change has come over the spirit of the 
South ; and it is a change which alters all our moral and 
political relations with slavery, except one — the old compact 
of non-interference. I do not say that this change is universal 
at the South. I believe that many hold to the old opinion. 
We are always mistaking partisan zeal for public sentiment — 
the agitated surface for the conservative depths of society, I 
was in a company of twenty Southern gentlemen a year and 
a half ago, when the subject of African slavery was freely 
discussed, and seventeen out. of the twenty held that it must 
and would die out and disappear from this country. But it is 
the determination of certain public leaders, and of a large 
party at the South, now to espouse the system ; to maintain 
that it is a good institution, and ought to be perpetual ; to 
demand for the slave interest an equal share in the partition 
of the States between slave and free labor — an equal share in 
the Government— a share, not as other property, but tnore than 
any other property or population in the land ; and, in conse- 
quence, Texas has been admitted, with leave to form four new 
States ; the Missouri compromise has been broken down ; and 
the most violent efforts are made to introduce and establish 
slavery in Kansas. 

Now, against all this, against the whole opinion and this 
whole course of conduct, with all my miglit, I protest. I am 
an humble individual ; I have but little influence to exert ; by 
my profession, or by the public opinion concerning it, I am 
excluded from all share in the government of the country; but 
if I had influence and power, I would say to my brethren of 
the South — if I was confronted with them now face to face, I 
would say to them respectfully, but frankly and firmly, " You 



29 

are in the wrong ; you certamly are in the wrong ; your judg- 
ment is wrong, your course is wrong ; the moment you left the 
toleration for the espousal of tliis system of human slavery, 
you lost the sympathy of all men ; you cannot make it an 
honored and praiseworthy act to huy and sell men ; no, no, 
you cannot ; the whole civilized world is against you ; it will 
be against you more and more ; even if you could throw off 
Northern interference or the Northern connexion, and form a 
republic for yourselves, your republic would lie under the 
social Ostracism of the whole world. For God's sake, consider 
what you are doing, and where you are going ! " Pardon, my 
friends, the solemnity of the adjuration. I speak only in the 
right of my own poor thought, but it cries to Heaven in its 
very weakness. But I would say to the whole country — 
consider, and consider soon. If extension — extension of the 
system — is to go on, the three millions of slaves will in time 
become thirty millions. What, in Heaven's name, are we to 
do with them ? They will grow in intelligence ; they will band 
in servile wars ; it is impossible to hold in safe hands such a 
tremendous element as this expanding humanity, thirty mil- 
lions strong. Tlie only safe measure, in my opinion, is to stop 
this expansion before the mass of evil and peril becomes too 
unwieldy for our grasp ; to contract, not expand, the area of 
slavery ; to let Yirginia, and Maryland, and Kentucky, and 
Missouri become free States — the point to which they are 
tending — and in due time, either to prepare these people for 
freedom and emancipate them, or else to induce multitudes of 
them to return to Africa, and enable them to do it by all the 
resources of the nation applied to that end. I am not a legis- 
lator, but if I were, I would never vote for another step of 
extension to the slave area, and for such a stand on this question 
I have the decisive words of Clay and Webster themselves. / 
would never vote Kansas to the doom of Virginia — to impov- 
erishment, to poor culture, to breeding and selling men for a 
living! I would never vote Kansas to slave labor, which, by 
long and solemn compromise, was pledged to free labor. If 
Kansas must come in as a slave State, it would be because I 
could not help it. 



30 

Heaven is my witness that I do not say these things in any 
unkindness to the South. I know many of its people but to 
esteem, very highly to esteem and honor them, I do not know 
the body of them — I am not acquainted with plantation life at 
the South. The great evils of the Southern system, doubtless, 
are there- — not in cities ; and I believe that they are great evils. 
I believe that all candid and thoughtful men among the planters 
admit it. There may be less cruelty than is often alleged, but 
there is great cruelty; there may not be many Legrees, but 
there are Legrees. When irrespousil)le j)ower and violent pas- 
sions hold the reign over a subject race, we know there must 
be cruelty ; and there must be a certain inhumanity ; and a 
passionate self-will, prompt to strike ; and an enervating, very 
fearful self-indulgence nurtured under such a system, especially 
in the young. Why do Southern parents send their sons to the 
North to be educated ? Let them give the reasons, and they 
will give a terrible argument against slavery ! That cannot 
be a good home for civilization, for Christianity, for morality, 
concerning which the parent, when choosing a place to educate 
his child, says, " ISTot here ; he must not stay here." 

I am accounted a moderate man on this subject, as I said 
before ; and I am v/illing to be thought to speak from the mode- 
rate side of the question. I will endeavor, for my part, to see 
both sides of it. I have talked much with good men at the 
South, who said, and honestly said, " The introduction of the 
African people into this country, though no blessing to us^ is a 
blessing to them ^ it is a grand means, under Providence, for 
civilizing and christianizing them." Nay, and strange as you 
may think it, I have heard the slave-owner himself fervently 
thank Heaven that his progenitors were brought to this country; 
because, by that means, he had attained to the Christian's joy 
and hope. And I have seen churches that numbered from live 
hundred to twenty-five hundred colored communicants ; and I 
have seen men and women (holders of slaves) who, even not 
only humane, but conscientious and considerate towards their 
people, watching over them, listening to their complaints, 
giving medicines for their ailments, instructing them in Sunday 
schools, instructing their children in the week time, laboring 



31 

in every way for their comfort and improvement. And who- 
ever would truly describe the life of our Southern people, 
should not leave out this class, for it is a class. J have listened 
also to what Southern apologists have said in another view — 
" that this burthen of slavery was none of their choosing ; that 
it was entailed upon them; that they cannot immediately 
emancipate their people ; that they are not able to take care 
of themselves; that this state of things must be submitted to 
for a while, till remedial laws and other remedial means shall 
bring relief." And so long as they said that^ I gave them my 
sympathy. But when they say, " spread this system — spread 
it far and wide," I cannot go another step with them. And it 
is not I that has changed, but they. When they say, "spread 
it over Kansas and Nebraska ; spread it over the West ; annex 
Cuba ; annex Central America ; make slavery a national insti- 
tution ; make the compact of the Constitution carry it into all 
the territories ; cover it with the national aegis ; set it up as part 
of our great republican profession ; stamp on our flag, and our 
shield, and our escutcheon, the emblem of human slavery ; " I 
say no, never ; God forbid ! 

In taking this stand I am not influenced by the excitement 
of the day. I know there are causes for this excitement. There 
has been a deed done in the Senate chamber, so atrocious 
that I have no name for it. There is a border war in Kansas, 
involving evil and mischief and wrong enough to stir the indig- 
nation of any just people. But if these things had not been 
done, I should still take the ground I now take — against the 
extension of the slave system. It is a wrong to humanity ; it 
is more to the soil. If slavery covered this whole planet to-day, 
in less than a century it would want another planet to sustain 
it. It tends to the demoralization of the people. It is in con- 
flict with our free institutions, and with all the ideas of the 
age. " We do not like it, sirs ; " that is what we say to all its 
advocates ; that is the feeling at the bottom of our hearts. 
Humanity is everywhere rising against it. Did you ever con- 
sider the significance of those negro songs that are so much 
sung in these days ? The negro is singing his loves, his domestic 
affections, his sorrows, into the ears of all the world; and 




^2 011 932 681 3^ 

humanity listens with sympathy. Who would not listen ! Are 
they not the lovers, the holy ties, the sacred sorrows of men ? 
Hallowed shall they be to me — sacred shall be the lot of those 
who feel them — no matter " what complexion an Indian or an 
African sun may have burnt upon them." I would advise the 
friends of slavery to pass statutes against the singing of these 
negro songs. They are the strongest anti-slavery speeches I 
know. But it would be in vain. There is a tide rising in the 
world that will sweep away this system. The very Czar is 
meditating the freedom of the slaves in his empire. All the 
world is demanding the freedom of all men. With equal 
calmness and confidence I wait the result. 



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